Fascinating 1958 personal account of a period of delusional mental illness from the inside. The individual behind the pseudonym has never been identified. I found this book to be compelling and memorable. ( )

This book is a detailed account of the hallucinations suffered by a woman who encountered a brief episode of schizophrenia. The strangest part may be just how not-strange the hallucinations are. They seem like a pretty valid reaction to office politics and life under capitalism.

At the end of the book the author spends time trying to find reason behind her psychotic episode. She grasps at many straws, including ESP and dowsing (branches of pseudoscience that have both been thoroughly debunked, but it's not like the author could go research the topics on the Internet before writing about them). While it was mildly amusing to read through the author's mental gymnastics trying to put her psychosis into context, I found that the author cherry-picked reasons that made sense in hindsight. It's always easy to rationalize, and much more difficult to explain. If she felt better thinking that it was all about her adrenal glands, then I'm glad she found relief. But 65 years later, still, nobody knows what causes schizophrenia, and still, there is no cure.

While this book was a fascinating glimpse into psychosis in a way that many other books on schizophrenia do not offer -- it was also not the most interesting book I've ever read. I just didn't find it worthy of all the 5-star reviews other reviewers here seem to think justified. I don't regret reading it, I just didn't love the book. ( )

The most baffling thing about this book is that it isn't more widely known than it is. I've no real idea why - perhaps because it was written and published in the '50s, rather than the more receptive '60s? Or, more likely, because of its subject, madness? Or that a lot of readers just aren't sure how to take it: as fiction or as fact? If it's fiction, then I guess you could very loosely class it as science fiction, although I've read a lot of that and I don't know of anything else quite like this, not even from Philip K Dick say - or Franz Kafka for that matter. But if it's fact, on the other hand,if all this really did happen as described, then it gives us an unusually clear view below the waterline of the mind, deep into what lies beneath everyday consciousness.
   Operators and Things is a first-person account of a six-month period of schizophrenia; rarely, some people do re-emerge from this condition spontaneously and without outside help, and here we not only have an account of this from the inside, but a rational one, told with absolute clarity by someone who not only recovered and understood precisely what had been happening to her, but is a superb author as well (the content is so unusual, it's easy to overlook just how brilliant the writing itself is). It begins like this: waking one morning, O'Brien finds three figures standing at the foot of her bed - the first wave of 'Operators' who will control her life (as a 'Thing') for the next six months. Only she can see them; they are friendly, expert, almost business-like, and tell her that her life is in great danger; a few days later she calls in sick at work, destroys all her ID and boards a Greyhound bus to a random destination. This is how she then spends much of those next six months, criss-crossing the USA and Canada, immersed in the world of Operators and Things. Then, just as abruptly, this phase ends - and what follows during the next three months is, if anything, even stranger as her mind, one unhurried step at a time, heals itself.
   The book is in four parts, the first three a description of the above, the fourth a thorough analysis and what's striking about all of it is how rational it is; there's nothing mad about O'Brien's 'insanity', in retrospect it makes perfect sense and backs up what a lot of people have long claimed: that schizophrenia isn't the problem, schizophrenia is a mind attempting to deal with the problem. More, 'the unconscious' itself has typically been seen as the mind's villain or as its garbage dump; O'Brien by contrast, through her own experiences, develops an increasingly healthy respect for this multi-talented, imaginative, shrewd and, yes, logical entity which she describes as 'an awesome instrument.' The unconscious mind as the unsung hero of human history, that's what O'Brien is giving us:
   "Things can think only to a very limited degree."
   "How limited?"
   "I'll tell you," Rink said with finality. "If it weren't for Operators, Things would still be wandering in and out of caves."
   What Operators and Things reminds me of in a superficial way is Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception - first the description of an eye-opening (and mind-opening) experience, then an acute examination of it - but O and T goes much deeper. In fact, in every respect this is, simply, one of the best books of any kind I've ever read. ( )